Microsoft Word is an extremely easy tool to start using. However there are lots of interesting features “under the bonnet”. Some of these features can save you a lot of time when producing documents. I am amazed that they are not as well known as they should be. These top seven tips are my favourites and I cannot imagine life with Microsoft Word before I found them!
1. Oops. I left Caps lock on!
We all know that feeling. You are typing away merrily and then you look up at your screen to realise that you had hit the Caps Lock button. Now everything you just typed is in the wrong capitalisation. Don’t despair. Highlight the text and goto the Format menu and select Change Case from the drop down menu. Then just select your desired case from the list provided, which will probably be tOGGLE cASE.
2. While we are talking Cases.
Some useful shortcut keys:
Highlight your text and click Control Shift A to set it all to Upper Case.
Control Shift K will set it to Small capitals.
3. Moving quickly around your document.
Try these shortcuts to get around your document quickly.
Control Alt Page Down: Next Page
Control Alt Page Up: Previous Page
Control Home: Go to the top of your document
Control Alt End: Go to the end of your document
Also, with later versions of Word there is a clever little button beneath the vertical scroll bar called the Select Browse Object. Click on this and select one of its options to browse through your document going straight to the next table, graphic, heading etc.
4. I’m lost. Where was I?
Forgot where you just made a change in your document? Try pressing Shift + F5.
This will take you back to the last place you made a change. You can do this two more times to go back to the two previous changes.
5. One click find
One of the annoyances of the Find screen when you are looking for occurrence of text in your document is the fact that it always seems to appear right over the text your are looking for! However there is no need to keep the screen open. Once you have used the Find command to find the first entry, close the Find screen. You should notice that the small double arrows below the vertical scroll bar on the right of Word have changed to blue. Click on these to go up and down your document finding your text.
6. Numbering the rows in your tables
How many times have you created a table where you just want the first column to be a numbered list. It’s easy to do this quickly. Simply select the column and click on the Numbering button on your Word toolbar. The same thing works if you select a row and want to have numbering across your columns
7. Fast Page breaks
My final tip is really simple and is probably the one I use the most. To insert a page break quickly, simply use CTRL + Enter
1. Oops. I left Caps lock on!
We all know that feeling. You are typing away merrily and then you look up at your screen to realise that you had hit the Caps Lock button. Now everything you just typed is in the wrong capitalisation. Don’t despair. Highlight the text and goto the Format menu and select Change Case from the drop down menu. Then just select your desired case from the list provided, which will probably be tOGGLE cASE.
2. While we are talking Cases.
Some useful shortcut keys:
Highlight your text and click Control Shift A to set it all to Upper Case.
Control Shift K will set it to Small capitals.
3. Moving quickly around your document.
Try these shortcuts to get around your document quickly.
Control Alt Page Down: Next Page
Control Alt Page Up: Previous Page
Control Home: Go to the top of your document
Control Alt End: Go to the end of your document
Also, with later versions of Word there is a clever little button beneath the vertical scroll bar called the Select Browse Object. Click on this and select one of its options to browse through your document going straight to the next table, graphic, heading etc.
4. I’m lost. Where was I?
Forgot where you just made a change in your document? Try pressing Shift + F5.
This will take you back to the last place you made a change. You can do this two more times to go back to the two previous changes.
5. One click find
One of the annoyances of the Find screen when you are looking for occurrence of text in your document is the fact that it always seems to appear right over the text your are looking for! However there is no need to keep the screen open. Once you have used the Find command to find the first entry, close the Find screen. You should notice that the small double arrows below the vertical scroll bar on the right of Word have changed to blue. Click on these to go up and down your document finding your text.
6. Numbering the rows in your tables
How many times have you created a table where you just want the first column to be a numbered list. It’s easy to do this quickly. Simply select the column and click on the Numbering button on your Word toolbar. The same thing works if you select a row and want to have numbering across your columns
7. Fast Page breaks
My final tip is really simple and is probably the one I use the most. To insert a page break quickly, simply use CTRL + Enter
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